Open-source News

New year, new OS: Nobara 41 Linux is a powerful Windows 11 alternative  BetaNews

Fedora-Based Nobara 41 Gaming Distro Switches to Open-Source NVIDIA Driver  9to5Linux

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop...

X.Org Server Development Hit A Decade High For The Number Of Commits In 2024  Phoronix

The most popular Linux gaming articles of 2024  GamingOnLinux

Make The Terminal More Enjoyable with These Linux Terminal Tools  Make Tech Easier

CachyOS Is an Arch Linux Distribution for (Almost) Everyone  The New Stack

PeaZip 10.2 Open-Source Archive Manager Released with Qt 6 Package for Linux  9to5Linux

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language...

Top 10 must-have apps for new Linux users in 2025  Neowin

Top 10 must-have apps for new Linux users in 2025  Neowin

During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year...

The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...

Linux "hid-universal-pidff" Driver Proposed For Fixing More Quirky Devices  Phoronix

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...

RISC-V Made Nice Software Progress In 2024 While Interesting Hardware Still Rare  Phoronix

The Steam snap is now much better for gaming  XDA Developers

The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...

With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...